Before the Origin of Species, before the The Descent of Man, before the HMS Beagle, before all of the controversy surrounding his theories, there lived a young Charles Darwin . Though he did poorly in school, remarking, "Nothing could have been worse for the development of my mind," he showed a fond interest for nature from the very beginning. Of all things though, the young Darwin was really into Beetles (the insect, not the band). In fact, that is quite an understatement. Darwin was really, really into beetles - the rarer the better. In the earlier days of his interest, he heeded the advice of his sister that he should not kill any beetle simply for the purpose of collecting and he therefore stuck to acquiring new and intact beetle corpses. Later, however, his "morals" on the subject went out the window and he pursued the insects at full force, dead or alive. This all lead up to an incident during his time at Cambridge which he recounted in his autobiography:
"I will give a proof of my zeal: one day on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as well as the third one"
It was as a beetle collector that Darwin's name first appeared in print in various British insect collecting publications. Oddly enough, despite his later tendencies, this fascination had little to do with science. Many times he didn't even bother to find out the names of the varieties of species that he captured. It was simply a hobby as one would collect stamps, coins, or baseball cards, done for the thrill of finding rare and new species and occasionally seeing his name in print as captor.
For me, amidst all of the controversy and propaganda surrounding him, this particular fact really put a human face on the man for the first time - an original geek.
"Whenever I hear of the capture of rare beetles, I feel like an old war-horse at the sound of a trumpet"
- Charles Darwin